I haven’t really had a stake in all of this, and mostly I’ve been following along for the hot goss, but this is the thing that’s so wild to me. This specific behavior of “you aren’t allowed to call Ghost a bully, but Ghost can call you a bully” truly boggles the mind.

In any case, if people just stop posting about this on MSB, it’ll probably slowly die off. Ghost and Derp will just quietly seethe and read this forum until someone tries to spark some kind of discussion they think is really, actually quite clever, or until Ghost can’t stand screaming into the void by themselves and rehashes this with some disingenuous post about toxicity or positivity.

@RedRocket said in AI Megathread:

So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.

no

@icanbeyourmuse said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I’ve already said my thoughts on the others. Except ghost. He just gives me the vibe he likes creating drama while pretending he isn’t out to do just that.

That’s almost certainly what he’s doing. He shows up on r/mud to do the same thing once in a while. He’s a dillweed.

I think that there’s a place for games that have conflict between the PCs, but there’s a few things to be mindful of.

Rephrasing PvP as “CvC” and allowing for CvC - Character vs Character - conflict while not tolerating PvP (player vs player) content is a good first step (which is something that Silent Heaven does, to my understanding). But with that, you also need to make sure that the community is well maintained and managed - games with hard coded conflict/competition (especially in the RPI space) tend to draw a toxic crowd, and making sure to get ahead of that with a cultivated community goes a long way towards making sure CvC doesn’t become PvP.

Something else to be mindful of is a “talk shit, get hit” kind of system of CvC can exacerbate problems, as well. Typically, troublemakers do what they do for attention, whether it’s positive or negative attention, so when someone rolls up to a space that has codified conflict, it’s very easy to generate attention by just acting out. This tends to get solved in the “community cultivation” step of things, but it’s one of the things that can crop up with having open conflict between PCs.

The common thread I see with people who support and use LLMs casually makes a whole lot of sense - they consistently aren’t willing to put in the work.

@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Narrator this has nothing to do with this thread, please shut up

This is the MU Peeves thread. “You replaced smart people with purple prose and pronouns” is a pretty scathing peeve. But no wonder you want me to shut up. That peeve applies to you, personally.

lmao i can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want you listen to you.

@Pavel said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

I think we’re all coming at this with a more ‘traditional’ MUSH mindset, when this seems (at least to me) more of a role-play-intensive MUD kind of environ, at least as it’s presented. So our cultural mores and expectations might be off.

My first impressions (having gone through Char-Gen/Tutorial, both of which are very good and like Jumpscare said probably very good indicators as to whether or not Silent Heaven will be a good fit for someone) is that it sits somewhere between RPI and MUSH (maybe more of a MOO, idk, all of the labels get a bit weird and sometimes I think the MU community relies on them too heavily).

It’s live, real time RP, with some crunch, but progression isn’t gated behind repetitive skill-based activities the way it generally would be in the RPIs and RP-enforced MUDs I’ve played in the past. I think the front page of the website says “RPI-Lite” and I think that’s a good way to put it.

My gut feel from wandering the grid a bit and reading helpfiles/interacting with the code a bit is that the systems Jumpscare has in place do a great job of telegraphing the theme and setting of the game.

If you don’t feel comfortable or safe living in the US and you’re lucky enough to have a parent (or possibly grandparent) that migrated here from another country - look up their country of origin, and see if they have Citizenship By Descent Laws. I was born in the US, but because my mom was born in Germany (and was a German citizen when I was born), I was able to get a German passport.

Obviously this won’t help EVERYONE out - but for the folks that are unaware that it is an option to them, it might be useful.

@Cobalt said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I just can’t even…

I’m more MUSH adjacent than a MUSH player. I mostly like to just be kept apprised of problematic actors that might wander into adjacent places (MUDs, MOOs, etc.), so I don’t really have a lot of stake in any of this. I followed over to BMD because I see value in those aforementioned things, and keeping my finger on the pulse, and didn’t really like the writing on the wall on MSB.

But from a pretty unbiased place (aside from being biased against the draconian nonsense that went down, but whatevs), what it looks like happened is Macha got mad that she got called out, and decided to stir up trouble on the other board (just like she stirred up all the drama over on MSB) to try to obfuscate the situation and discredit you.

Maybe that isn’t what happened, and maybe there IS something else going on, but I’m of the opinion that: if that’s true, it will eventually be outed, because to me it’s MUCH more plausible that a problematic player is obfuscating things than a game dev is obfuscating things to the degree that they would shut down their entire game (and that’s a WHOLE lot of tracks to cover, compared to one problematic player trying to flip the narrative).

Hence all of the mental gymnastics they’re going through to try to justify that major decision.

@Tributary said in City of Glass - Discussion:

@Apos said in City of Glass - Discussion:

I’m feeling a little slighted, tbh.
I’m still pretty put off by this whole thing tonight.

I… had to check again to see what I’d posted because for a moment I thought you were actually quoting him.

You may recall that I put in my original post that an old mu friend of mine (from Ithir) messaged me on Discord saying that her boyfriend had been banned from CoG and that she was puzzled because none of the behavior he attributed to me was part of her experience with me (like 5 years ago!).

Here’s what he told me:

Shamash — Today at 18:10
fucking gross
I actually feel, like, vaguely violated.
This is new.

Shamash — Today at 18:13
I told a player on that game I didn’t want our PCs to continue seeing one another because said PC was also seeing other men. I was not rude. I didn’t slut-shame. I literally just said “I wish you the best, but it’s not my vibe, I’m genuinely sorry if it upsets you.”
I got banned for “bad vibes”.
I was punished, by what I must now assume is a staff alt, for telling them no to a relationship

Shamash — Today at 18:15
I could get a ban for bad behavior. But damn, this is just gross

Shamash — Today at 20:00
It’s just so angering. The idea I was punished for not giving someone what they want.
Like they were entitled to me pursuing them IC.
ugh. Hour later and it’s still rubbing me wrong. Like grease on my skin.

(Timestamps hers. Also, girl, find another man. This one is a lying manipulative sack of shit.)

someone using the name Shamash (shamash4264) got banned from the r/mud discord for being a dick within like a week or less of joining (he was also a raging, callous fascist) - dunno if it’s the same one, but the name struck me as memorable!

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:

dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there

I have seriously been wondering if this was a 4chan guy but he seemed different than the standard 4chan guy? IDK, maybe they contain multitudes.

nah i found the “zine” they’re publishing, including the zine’s social media presence on the fediverse (and one of the two main contributors to the zine’s accounts/handles).

there’s a reason they weren’t loud and proud with the fact that they publish IDDQD Magazine and instead did a soft sell (probably trying to find likeminded people here to DM them to grift for money).

@shit-piss-love said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

This sounds like HellMOO.

Given how much of the content that could be found in HellMOO is just straight up barred from Silent Heaven, this is a pretty egregious and unnecessary exaggeration that doesn’t serve to do anything but stir up bad feelings and hate. Organ harvesting is a thing that can happen I guess, but that’s about it.

That being said, I think that it’d probably be fine if the “30 minute disconnect protection” that exists was just extended to be “if your client disconnects without quitting for any reason, you auto-pause”. If people start to “abuse it” (disconnect instead of using quit to avoid the Bad Stuff in town), I think that’s probably fine. I think there’s some (valid) concerns that people might use that to avoid consequences (going to mouth off at the Big Spooky Bad Guy and then DCing when they get got), but I also think that can come down to a mixture of bringing that to Staff attention when it happens, and then just choosing to avoid RPing with people who do that kind of thing.

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Narrator
lol my dude did you just compare yourself to Jesus on a message board? Is that where we are now?

dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there

@MisterBoring said in Song of Avaria:

I don’t play Arx, but I’ve read enough of the Arx wiki to ask…

How is this scratching the Arx itch? The wiki reads like the entire game is about a bunch of people stuck on a ship hoping to find a new land that may never come.

My understanding is that the ship setting is just for alpha testing, and that the intention is to move things to a city-proper when things are better sorted.

RE: the overarching talk of RPI vs MUSH - I have limited experience with MUSHes, but from what I’ve seen of Avaria (from playing around in the landing zone for new PCs) is that it’s probably closer to an RPI than a MUSH in terms of the game itself, with more concrete and codified systems. But the focus does seem to be more on storytelling, compared to most of my RPI experiences in the past (which largely have been PvP games masquerading as storytelling games).

One last post before I go back to lurking quietly and sometimes upvoting people.

The Angels v Demons thing sounds like the most fun to me. I think a lot of the problematic issues (re: harmful content) can probably be solved with a sufficient staff-size, an up-front warning about what kinds of content will be unacceptable, and no hesitation to issue bans to anyone introducing that content for any reason (if it’s a weird gray area situation, issue a temporary ban, and if it happens again permaban).

I’d also try to, OOCly, frame the Angels/Demons as being more religiously-agnostic. If people WANT to play Biblical Angels and Demons (whatever that means to them), then that should be okay. But the prior post about having the “Upper Management” (on both ends of the spectrum) be more mysterious and BEYOND MORTAL KENNING would be the ideal to me.

@Gashlycrumb said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I wonder if anyone still cares about The Magicians.

I think about The Magicians as a setting for a TTRPG quite a bit - but I also think that the most people who say they want a setting like the Magicians really just mean they want a slice-of-life urban fantasy game. There’s nothing wrong with this, it just isn’t really what the Magicians is about at the end of the day, and I tend to think that most of the most important themes just don’t translate very well to what most people want out of an RP game.

I also think that there probably needs to be room for (if not a focus on) interpersonal conflicts within the characters of the player-base, which requires both a very mature/responsible p-base and a well curated and moderated community with very little tolerance for people that are taking advantage of the social-conflict heavy nature of the setting. Which is probably why…

@bear_necessities said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I do but it has made for an awful MUSH every time

The MU attempts have largely been unsuccessful. People, it turns out, don’t tend to want to play in an ironic, “magic actually can’t fix your problems you have to deal with your shit” game that’s high in drama and social conflict. And many of of the people that do end up kind of sucking (or being willing to put up with people who suck, because they have limited options for this particular scope of RP).

@Perfect-Paz said in What happened, man?:

Yo, so I decided to dodge your ban for fun. Turns out, my thread is the only that’s been posted in in just over a week. Before that? Three weeks ago. Even on other boards of this forum, like Rough and Rowdy, you have one thread that’s been posted in recently, and the rest are literally three weeks old at a minimum since being touched. The last time Game Ads got touched was literally months ago.

Your forum is dead, and the only posts it gets are desperate, cockamamie attempts to discredit my (correct) view that you tried to take a hobby and hollow it out, but in reality you ceded it to the people you hate most without realizing it. Oh no, you didn’t like MAP13 from 30yrs ago? LOL!

I’ve been banned for days and you can’t help but cope, seethe, and dilate about how your ilk has been gatekept from everything worthwhile, and pointing it out does brighten my day a little bit considering how fundamentally malignant you lot have proven yourselves to be over the last 15yrs.

lol chill out snowflake

@Tez I don’t participate in this community much beyond lurking, but I’d encourage staff to permanently ban vs just a temporary ban. It may very well NOT be the person I’m thinking it is, but she reads a lot like a very problematic troll that’s haunted Haven for like a decade now, or something like that? The way that thread unfolded reads exactly like the pattern of behavior I’ve seen there in the past from RG/Rage Girl as she’s colloquially been dubbed there (seems very reasonable if confused -> minor squabbles over misunderstandings -> sudden anger directed at the first person to feed the troll -> lapsing into accusing people of being staff/cheaters, and/or using slurs and threatening to kill people).

@Rinel said in Silent Heaven: Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss:

@oferated said in Silent Heaven: Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss:

@Pavel said in Silent Heaven: Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss:

I really want to know who she thinks I am… it’s not like the one time I got fired from staff (and not banned, weirdly) is a secret.

She said in her first reply to you, I think. Daed from Haven. IDK anything about him being banned from Haven and I’m not inclined to go find out, but he used to be the one banning her on the regular. Like, when I played from… 2013-2017? She was a weekly occurrence, more or less. Sometimes way more.

They are just a deeply unwell person who goes nuclear at even the mildest hint of perceived negativity.

Oh, so she’s a known quantity? I kind of liked it being a whirlwind out of nowhere.

She sounds like she needs a lot of help.

Yeah. She reads like “RG”, or “rage girl”, who’s haunting Haven for quite some time - since the beginning, as far as I can recall. I’m guessing she’s gotten bored with Haven and is trying to find where older Haven players have migrated to (I haven’t checked in a while, but the last time I was paying attention to Haven Tyr was making some supes unpopular decisions). But the vibe I’ve always gotten has been “either a troll, or very unwell”.

@Jennkryst said in Numenera?:

The more I skim over these books and like … spend actual monies on the things because the FLGS had the Bilbo Baggins Birthday sale and junk…

We got a great generic system that is entirely thematic for weird shit to happen in. You want Horizon Zero Dawn robot animals? Thematic. You want cool cybernetic stuff? Thematic. You want wilderness majik? Thematic. You want Spelljammer (thematic) that isn’t a hot mess (5e design team just dropped that ball big time)?

LETS GOOOOOO!

The Cypher System is suuuuper underrated. I got to go to a panel featuring Monte Cook when Numenera was still being kickstarted, and it was neat to see him talk about the design behind it. Numenera (and the Cypher System) is basically what we would have gotten in the d20 system if WoTC had told him and the design team, from the get go, to design a generic “Catch All” system instead of to design 3e D&D.